Today, I am reading and commenting on  Ezekiel 16.

I generally do not like applying prophecies about Israel, or Judah, to modern society.  However, as I read today’s passage I could not help but think that Ezekiel’s description of how God found the nation of Israel as an abandoned baby, cared for it as a child, raised it to adulthood, and took it as His wife could be seen to apply to the United States, and perhaps other modern nations.  This does not mean that I think the United States, or any other modern nation (perhaps some biblical prophecies concerning Israel apply to modern Israel), is God’s chosen people, merely that there certainly seems to be an element of God taking an orphaned nation under His care in the history of the United States.  Likewise, Ezekiel’s description of Judah trusting in its “beauty” and becoming a “prostitute” by turning from God to various forms of idolatry also applies to the behaviors of the people of the United States.  All of this emphasizes the importance of working to repair the “wall” which Ezekiel wrote about in yesterday’s passage.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on  Ezekiel 16.

Ezekiel compares the way God treated Jerusalem, and all of the Israelites, to someone who found a baby girl abandoned by her mother right after birth.  In fact the comparison is to a newborn which was purposefully left to die in the wilderness.  Instead of allowing them to die, God cared for them and provided for their needs.  Then, in the analogy, when the girl reached womanhood, rather than leaving her to be taken advantage of by whatever man came along, God married her and continued to provide for her.  God showed love and care for His people, when the “ways of the world” suggest that He could have used “her” for His desires and abandoned “her” when He was finished with “her”.  Rather than respond to the love which God showered on them, the people of Jerusalem (and all of Israel) unfaithfully chased after others.  They took the rich gifts which God had given them and spent them on getting the attention of others.  They failed to see how following the laws and morals which God gave them had also given them the luxuries and happiness which they acquired.  Instead, they took the luxuries which came from belonging to God and used them to cheat on Him.  God has treated each of us much the same way, and we have responded by betraying His love.  However, God still loved the people of Israel and brought them back to Himself.  He will do the same for us if we allow Him to do so.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on  Ezekiel 16.

I never quite know what to do with this passage for a couple of reasons.  First, it addresses people as a group, in particular, the people of Israel, rather than as individuals.  Second, it makes a simile between adultery and idolatry which does not work in either our current views of idolatry or adultery (or even marriage).  Today we do not normally associate idol worship with sexual activity, nor do we normally consider sexual immorality as an expression of idol worship.  However, the separation we imagine between idolatry and sexual immorality results from our failure to truly understand both human sexuality and the role which worship plays in our lives.  This realization came to me as I saw the way Ezekiel connected child sacrifice with both sexual immorality and idol worship in today’s passage.  I had long ago come to see the connection between the child sacrifice condemned by Old Testament prophets and abortion.  Today, I connected the casual view of sexual immorality which underlies the support for abortion today and the idolatry which the Old Testament prophets condemn.  From there I saw how Ezekiel ties together idolatry, sexual immorality, and the oppression of the weak among us in today’s passage.

It always interests me to see where God’s Spirit leads me when I do not know what to write about a passage.  I do not mean to say that my blog today, or any day, is especially inspired by God.  Anyway, we often overlook how sexual immorality results from treating others as objects which we can use for our own pleasure.  This same attitude also leads to oppression of those weaker than ourselves in other ways.  And all of this results from us worshiping ourselves in place of God.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on  Ezekiel 16.

I get somewhat uncomfortable when I write about today’s passage because the metaphor which Ezekiel uses here offends the sensibilities of our society.  However, the important thing to remember is that this was just a metaphor intended to communicate how thoroughly dependent upon God the people of Judah, and we ourselves, were for everything which they had.  Rather than be grateful to God for all that they had, they sought after others to take His place.  They took the gifts which God had given them and used them to entice others (both idols and nations) to take the place which God should have held in their lives.  And not only did they offer the material gifts which God had given them, they killed the children which He had given them, His children.  In some ways, Ezekiel’s metaphor is one of the strongest anti-abortion passages in the Bible.  The children which are killed in abortion are both a gift from God being thrown away in order to gain favor with some other god and themselves God’s children.  Of course the children being sacrificed are not just the ones lost to abortion, but our society sacrifices the children which God has given us in many other ways.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Ezekiel 16.

I hate to put the United States in the place of Israel, or Judah, in Old Testament prophecies because the United States is NOT God’s Chosen Nation.  However, there is some parallel between the founding of this country and this prophecy.  The United States did not gain its independence because of its strength of arms.  It became independent because world affairs meant that Britain could not dedicate the force necessary to put down the rebellion.  Even after that, the United States remained a weak nation whose prosperity grew because world affairs kept more powerful nations from attacking it.  Throughout that history one also sees numerous accessions when God’s Spirit swept through the nation transforming society for the better.  And now we as a nation seek other gods and sacrifice our children on the altar of political expedience, not just through abortion, but also through the child predators who seem to inhabit the highest levels of power in our nation.  However, it is more than just that.  As I mentioned yesterday, even many of those who seek to bring about change place more emphasis on the government as the solution than on God.  The change we need will not come from the government.  It will only come if and when we turn to God and ask Him for deliverance.

I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Ezekiel 16.

There are a few prophetic visions in the Bible which I struggle with applying to my life, or to society around me.  This is one of them because it is so specifically to the people of Jerusalem and Judah just before the Exile.  Yet, there are aspects of it we can generalize to ourselves and the society around us.  The line which made it come home to me was the beginning of verse 15: “But you thought your fame and beauty were your own.”  This made me see how we as individuals and as a society often fail to credit God for what He has given us.  As individuals, we see our wealth, our possessions, our health, or even our bodies as things which we obtained on our own and as things with which we can do whatever we want.  We fail to recognize that they are gifts from God and that we should seek to discover what He wants us to do with them.

As a society we often view our blessings as things which came to be purely through the hard work of our predecessors who passed these good things on to us to use, or throw away, as we desire.  Again, we fail to recognize that these things were gifts from God, given for His purposes.  Some of the things we choose to throw away are values which led our predecessors to do the things which brought about the world in which we live.  Rather than look to see which of those values were gifts from God which brought about good and which were products of our predecessors sins, we choose those which appeal to us and throw away those which do not. 

It is not enough that our society takes the wealth and possessions which God gave us and uses them selfishly.  No, our society has chosen to take the children which God gives us and sacrifice them on the altar of convenience.  When I read passages such as today’s, my first thought is on the atrocity which is abortion in this country, but really our society’s sacrifice of children goes far beyond that.  We see it in the parents who use their children to satisfy their own ambitions, whether that is in sports, or show business, or the many other ways in which parents push their children that are not healthy for the children.